Pervasive environment includes a collection of mobile, desktop devices, workstations (e.g., at office, home, etc), laptop, tablet, smart phone, and other such devices. A variety of files needs to be managed in pervasive environments for multiple-devices, e.g., not just text file, but rich text documents, photos, music, videos, etc. In addition, there are many versions of the same files as those files are frequently being updated or changed. Ideally, one would like to keep all the versions; always pre-fetch versions to local storage before user access them; and always backup all versions to multiple locations to provide higher availability. However, such ideal provisions are costly and may not provide an efficient solution.
Known systems such as DROPBOX provide file repository which keeps only the latest version and synchronizes files for every device, i.e., files are duplicated in every devices. Another known system such as ICLOUD provides an application data repository for system built-in applications only and maintains the same data in all devices, regardless of the usage of the data.
While synchronizing a modified file of a device on all other devices may maximize the file availability, such mechanism does not consider other aspects such as the ability to rollback to earlier version, battery and bandwidth for best usage of mobile devices, whether the synchronized data has usage on all the devices (e.g., some data may not have any usage on certain device as in an example case where a mobile device might not have a player for some format of multimedia data).